We’re weeks away from HAIM’s fourth album, I quit, one of The A.V. Club‘s most anticipated of the summer. The band continue to tease the new record with grungy, grounded tracks. The latest is “Take Me Back,” a nostalgic reminiscence on younger, wilder days. But even though the song professes a wish to return to that simplicity, there’s also an acknowledgment of forward movement: “I can’t pretend I got where I got/Without changing in my mind,” Danielle Haim sings, later adding, “Yeah, I fucked it up, but I took the heat/And I learned from it.”
In a post to social media, Danielle shared that the sister trio started writing “Take Me Back” at her home studio on Garage Band, and gave a shout out to Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, a free arts school that she, Este, and Alana all attended. “This was a very nostalgic time for the 3 of us because we all found ourselves single for the first time since we were all in high school. [We] were going out all the time, just the three of us (no boyfriends lol),” she wrote. “We brought the chorus to [producer Rostam Batmanjili] and the rest of the song kinda flew out of all of us. [Songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr.] came over and we all just started exchanging crazy stories about our teenage years. Long story short- high school is insane. These stories are real. Names have been changed.”
“Take Me Back” is a jaunty tune, a ’90s-inflected sound in the vein of Sheryl Crow or the Indigo Girls, which feels especially thematically appropriate given the contents of the lyrics. Also thematically appropriate is the single cover: the artwork for each new HAIM release so far has been recreations of throwback paparazzi shots, taken by Terrence O’Connor (the creative director who has worked with Charli XCX and Lorde). This one’s a parody of a photo of Kiera Knightely and Jamie Dornan from 2004. The album itself isn’t about longing for the past; it’s actually about leaving things behind (“I quit what does not serve me,” as a screen at one of their recent L.A. shows read). But even “Take Me Back” acknowledges the youthful folly of wishing “that nothing would be different.” Still, the lead singer shared in her Instagram post that the song “makes me emotional because if teenage Danielle knew she would be making music that sounded like this, she wouldn’t believe it.” I quit debuts June 20.
